Paper short abstract:

This presentation unpacks the educational trajectories of stayer youth, i.e., migrants' children who stay in origin countries. This work demonstrates how diverse social network support complements or substitutes migrant parental care in the youth's primary-secondary school trajectories.

Paper long abstract:

Literature on the effects of parental migration on the education of children who stay at origin, what we call 'stayer' youth, mainly focuses on educational outcomes without looking at the process leading to such outcomes. This article addresses this gap by showing how educational trajectories of stayer youth unfold. Stayer youth encounter a range of obstacles and interruptions to their education when their parents move overseas, and we explore the agency these youth exert and the support networks they activate to try to overcome them. We employ a youth-centric methodology, based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in three cities in Ghana, with young people whose parents migrated internationally. We find that frequent changes in residence, limited financial means, and lack of academic support cause interruptions in educational trajectories. In response, the young people mobilize support from local social networks to compensate for what they lack from their transnational connections.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how young women from marginalized communities with strong migration cultures engage with postsecondary education to construct mobile identities in the rural space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on anthropological work on education and development to probe the importance of education in a context where migration is the main pathway to mobility. It is based on an eleven-month-long ethnographic study that involved residing in and spending extended time in the homes of young Dalit women from upwardly mobile families. These young women reside in Chaheru, a predominantly Dalit village in the Doaba region of Punjab with a strong culture of migration. In Chaheru, young women pursue a college education to access international migration and government employment. However, young women's chances of attaining these mobility outcomes and moving away from the village space are severely limited. I argue that in the absence of mobility outcomes young women while remaining in the village space use college education to construct middle-class identities. The middle-class ethos is defined as one that facilitates movement outside the village, enhances status, and is distinctive from the backward lower classes. How young women use education to construct their middle-class identity is shaped by their family's social and economic position.

Paper short abstract:

Different people have contrasting experiences of the risks and opportunities of migration depending on their socio-economic background, education, and when they migrate. This paper explores how recent Vietnamese migrant backgrounds affect their chances of successfully landing a job in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

Vietnamese migration to the UK has been increasing over the past two decades and primarily takes two distinct routes: (1) educated students from wealthy, urban families pay extortionate tuition fees to study at UK universities, attempting to stay and find work afterwards; and (2) young people from underdeveloped provinces incur huge debts and pay extortionate fees to migration brokers who assist in 'smuggling' them into the UK to work informally in a nail salon. Both routes may eventually lead to the same desired end goal: a steady income to send remittances back to Vietnam and the hopes of living in a 'developed' country. Yet one route is incredibly dangerous, often traumatic and involves years of precarious living 'under the radar', in fear of deportation.

This paper reflects on how Vietnamese migrants experience the two-tier global migration regime that sorts migrants into rights-holders with access to social and legal citizenships and temporary workers with very limited or no rights whatsoever. Based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation of Vietnamese communities in the UK, I explore how class prejudices and privileges emerge or dissolve when Vietnamese migrants from different class backgrounds interact and work together in the face of common hardships and xenophobia in the UK.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the complex relationship between female rural-urban migration, domestic work, and education in the context of Ethiopia's

Paper long abstract:

Increasing numbers of rural girls and young women in Ethiopia are migrating to urban towns and cities and taking up employment as domestic workers, some of whom continue their education in urban schools. For urban households, rural migrants help to fill the domestic work gaps created by the entry of urban women into employment. For poor rural young women, migrating as a domestic worker is an important strategy for social mobility and empowerment. Yet, rural domestic workers remain largely hidden in the city and we know little about their lived experiences. In this paper, we start to address this gap, drawing on interviews with eight rural domestic workers living in the city and attending evening classes. We reveal the extent to which intersecting inequalities in rural areas disempower these young women, and how migration and education become important strategies for improving their lives. We show how the support of social network members is crucial in enabling participants' migration, yet how this also leads to power asymmetries and exploitation. We reflect on how the ability of rural young women to achieve better futures is limited due to their status as poor, rural, female migrants, yet how many wait in the city in the hope of a better future. Our analysis highlights how the lives and experienced of rural young women must be considered in the context of deeply entrenched structural inequalities that underpin the experiences and choices of rural girls and young women.